The disabled refugee’s
self-maiming, mutilation and torture is the crying lament of a body rendered
speechless, voiceless, and mute. When a body is manipulated and intentionally
dis-figured in order to be read according to legal and biological standards,
bodily verses whisper and whimper in their literal-ness. Although, a new and
hitherto unknown body has been created and produced, the act of writing the
body is itself hidden, concealed, rendered illegible in its very composition.
The self-infliction of bodily degradation is written with the intention, and by
necessity requires, the effacement of all traces of author or artifice

The refugee’s dis/abling
lament is composed upon a canvas whose creative potentiality must coincide with
the prohibition of its revelation as a canvas as such. The inexorable tension
between a body disciplined into illegibility and its uncertain status as a
lived, performative utterance of the poetic constitutes the incommensurable
space dividing and connecting two irredeemable nights; and their passing over,
into, and past one another.

The body’s self-inflicted
violence is the cry of the lament “a paradoxical record of loss” – the body
becomes a fugitive to itself – the cuts, the whips, the burns and scars are
letters which remain illegible even in their narration – the meaning of a body’s
transfigurations can be neither identified nor apprehended – in the communal
doctor’s office, the detention center’s medical clinic, the prison’s health
care center, or the aid station of the camp: speaking a body’s truth remains
prohibited, only its biology may be read – The ‘true’ discourse of a body’s
meaning is inscribed in blood and bones where speech falls upon deaf ears:

the lament does not produce a document
but simply inscribes, in a neutral register, the absence of documentation…if
the lament can be said to produce anything at all, it would be only the
deferral of production…it is ‘[a]s if suspicion of the letter in its regulated
sense wanted, through innovative tension, to precipitate the course of the
shattering and the flagrant diversion of the forbidden.’ (Duffy, “Emergency
Poetics”

The gaping wound of a
forced choice becomes the revelatory event in which the chains linking bio-medicine
and nature, zoe and natura, break free, shattering the correspondence between an
external telos and the mimesis of scientific representations. A body missing a
linguistic prosthetic but retaining the capacity to communicate exposes the
fallibility of a restricted economy of linguistic meaning.

the blank literal event within which
‘words begin to become their appearance,’ where words no longer reflect an
established order outside of language but rather the self-referential
inscription of letters, their gaping detour (Duffy, “Emergency Poetics”).

The err, the
rub, lay not with the fibers or systems of bodily vitality, but renders visible
the already distorted, and disfigured nature of the totality of worldly
relations, of the system which translated bios into biology.

perspectives
must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with
its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in
the messianic light [...] It is the simplest of all things, because the situation
calls imperatively for such knowledge [...] But it is also the utterly
impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even by a hair’s
breath, from the scope of existence (Adorno, Minima Moralia).

What emerges is a writing
that does not write; a space, a non-communicating vacuole in which an event
emerges through its very disappearance. The incomprehensible task of
documenting the disabled body remains forever impossible because its wounds, its
blind spots, its gaping openings and disfigurations are stuck within a series
of infinite displacements, an unfolding of markers that bare no essential
marker of absolute meaning absent a legible referent of really existing able-bodiedness.
The fractured body’s representation is both the simplest of things to speak,
since it is the condition of articulation itself, but also the most impossible
of things to speak, since it assumes one’s articulation isn’t itself already disabled
by the finitude of existence.

‘[T]he disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything
intact…because the disaster itself is properly unthinkable, unpronounceable and
illegible (Blanchot, The Writing of
Disaster)

Thus, the dis/abled body’s
remains remain stuck within the paradox of effacement and remainder; dis/ability
persists as dis/aster.

'Going Brogue' Podcast!

I've always wanted to start a podcast, and this blog seems to be an awesomely apt medium through which to host and disseminate one. I have several friends that love too shoot the breeze and always share their opinions on anything and everything and so, once this debate season ends I will begin a series of podcasts titled "Going Brogue" (No, not the shoes).

I was curious about my readers' thoughts on the idea? What would ya'll like to see discussed? What other podcasts do you enjoy listening to?

The podcast would discuss many of the ideas on Cyberhetoric but perhaps venture outwardly more, either into more immediately contemporary political and pop cultural issues as they arise, or more distantly into great classics of philosophy, politics, and literature.

If you have any thoughts, comments, dreams, or desires please shoot me an email or a comment.

Supreme Cyber Council

How Did Iran beat Cyberhetoric to the chase on the idea of a Supreme Cyber Council? Perhaps, Cyberhetoric can still get appointed some day or start an even more grandiose sound Cyber Council.

The details on the securitization of religion and the Islamic revolution are somewhat interesting though. It appears that Iran perceives a matrix of multiple threats:

An internal threat resulting from Information Overload & TMI:

Iran is facing a “tsunami of information”, which is why it needs a concerted effort to deliver its messages and deal with the efforts made by its enemies in this field. Iran is also facing a technological progress that can be harnessed to provide more effective social and government services and improve the relationship between the administration and the public.

At a meeting with his Iraqi counterpart, Taqipour said that Western countries, particularly the United States, use the internet for spying and spreading corruption, but that Iran has launched activities designed to manage the use of the internet and limit its abuse. The internet should serve all countries in the world, not just the West, which uses it for its economic needs and for harming other countries, the minister said (Fars, March 10).

And a hybrid threat to the integrity, security, and livelihood of the Islamic revolution, its traditions and memories and their historical archive:

Seyyed Mehdi Khamoushi, chairman of the Islamic Propagation Organization, discussed the need for the establishment of the new council. In an article published on the Supreme Leader’s official website, Khamoushi said that Iran’s enemies consider the “soft war” and the cultural attack on Iran to be the most important struggle intended to undermine the Islamic revolution. Iran needs to protect its philosophical, religious, and cultural borders, and take advantage of cyberspace to send out its message to the world and fight against the messages sent by its enemies.

Mohammad Boroujerdi was an Iranian; one of the founders of Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution and a commander in Iran-Iraq War. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What does this break down of threats tell us about the changing nature of the ways that Cyber technologies and their development have become vital markers of:

a nation's status,

its livelihood as an imagined community, and

its capacity for survival, physically, and historically by participating in the archiving of itself?